Distributed sensor networks utilize a set of sensors performing measurements across time and space to gather information about their environment. The sensors typically use wireless communication (e.g., radio transmission) to send their measured data to a central computer system, which accumulates the data and builds it into a larger picture. In some sensor network systems, communication among sensor nodes is organized as a set of links, scheduled in time into a communications frame A communications scheme organized in this way saves power by minimizing the total time each node needs to have its transmitter and receiver powered on. Each frame can be designed for a different communication need (e.g., system startup, normal operation, node diagnostics, emergency purposes), and nodes can individually switch among frames as necessary or nodes can have multiple frames operating concurrently.
However, latency, or the time it takes a communication message to travel from one point to another in the network, can be very high in a system using a set of general-purpose communication frames. This may be due to the fact that a given pair of nodes may communicate very infrequently in a frame, only sending small packets of data in each link, causing communication, especially for large amounts of data, to take a very long time. Also, in some cases only a portion of a network or a portion of communication links of the network are desired to be used. For example, a frame defines communication links where for a given purpose only some of the communication links are desired to be used and the remaining links, if the frame is activated for the given purpose, would not be used and would waste power listening for messages.